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The Visual Studio Engineering Team also announced today that Visual Studio 2015 will support sharing open source extensions hosted on GitHub within Visual Studio Gallery. I could have sworn they had something that worked like GitHub
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nyah nyah
#SupportHeForShe If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept 1 of 2 basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not alone. Either way, the implications are staggering!-Wernher von Braun
Only 2 things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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Cheeky monkey. OK, fixing that.
TTFN - Kent
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I’m giving away MILLIONS of FREE Microsoft eBooks again! Hurry! Time limited offer. Crazy Eric's ebook store: our prices are INSANE!
Update: fixed thanks to the mighty, powerful, all-knowing (and editing) Oz
modified 7-Jul-15 17:29pm.
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Is it possible to reduce – or even eliminate – the human factor when it comes to testing software releases? In a word, yes. Here’s how. Must. Stop. Mentioning. Betteridges's Law.
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In this time of constant connection, more and more apps continue to be created. Extreme Agile Development? Supple Development? Agile Waterfall?
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Plasma - as far away from SOLID as possible.
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There’s a reality that software developers need to face: they need to learn how to do things right and do them fast.
When I was a young whippersnapper, I used to go to computer conventions. You know, the place where you used to be able to talk to other devs, see cool new ideas, who cared if they ever came to fruition, it was a time of imagination and thinking outside of the box.
I stopped going to computer conventions a long time ago, probably marked by when they were taken over by the new big guys and started to have rock bands introduce new tech.
But I digress. In that time, there were a few failed but interesting attempts at getting a computer to write computer programs. The demos were actually impressive, and the hardware was state of the art: 6502's clocking at 1Mhz.
The point being, if you want a computer program written fast and right, we need to get out of the mindset that programmers should do that, because frankly, they can't. Ever. Machine's will need to write programs for machines, and that's what we should be focusing on.
It's strange to me that some 30+ years later, we still don't have that ability. It actually isn't that hard of a nut to crack. Oh, but I forget, because of Agile and refactoring, the whole idea of spec'ing something out with sufficient detail that a monkey coder (or a computer algorithm) could write the code, well, that'll never happen, because nobody has the skills anymore to actually write a spec. User stories? Give me a break -- they are useful high level PowerPoint'ish methods of communicating but are hardly sufficient to describe the nitty gritty details of implementation.
And sure, in the beginning, there will be lots of hand coding of custom solutions. But again, nobody writes these things as components or services that can be plugged into an app, so they get rewritten, over and over and over again. I see no reason why a company couldn't have both a private library representing their intellectual property and, if the open source community could get its act in order, a suite of OS solutions that were truly plug-in components. We have a lot of work to do to get there, but it is certainly doable. I'm not counting on it happening in my life time though.
Marc
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Not that I disagree ... completely off topic I know ... but isn't all the shapes of abstraction a form of such "let the computer do the details for you" approach to programming?
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Looks like the page has gone missing, I just got a custom 404 page on their site? 
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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Yeah, looks like they pulled the article. Sorry.
TTFN - Kent
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This morning's future of Agile turned into this afternoon's distant past. Damn, things in Agile move fast! 
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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The BBC today unveiled the final version of its new Micro Bit, a pocket-sized computer that will be used by millions of children in UK schools to learn coding. Does it support texting?
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Firefox's tentative plans for the future include ditching its legacy XUL technology, long regarded as a hindrance to the browser's evolution. Do the plans involve paddles, and someone shouting, "Clear!"?
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Interesting NY times op-ed using Google aggregate data for New York: [^]
WE search for doctors at 8:20 a.m., recipes at 4:52 p.m. and enlightenment at 3:16 a.m. So far, the Google data that analysts have worked with has been daily, weekly or annual, but Google recently released the same anonymous, aggregate data down to the minute. I looked at this data for New York State for four weekdays, a small sample, certainly, yet the patterns were very sharp.
At the end of the article is a rather interesting inforgraphic: [^].
«I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center» Kurt Vonnegut.
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In the wake of some belt-tightening, what's next for Microsoft's search and advertising platforms? I suppose they could DuckDuckGo for an answer
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It’s only a matter of time until the Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL) will regain its spotlight as one of the most in-demand skills of future generations of software engineers. "That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die."
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More code has been written with COBOL than all other languages put together. It is used by banks, financial institutes, government agencies etc etc. The cost of re-developing these application using more modern technologies is far too great. These legacy systems will simply keep going forever, and hence the demand for those skills will do the same.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare
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<citation needed>.
I'm sorry, I just don't believe that without some realistic citation.
I'd be willing to bet £100 against that - I suspect more code has been written in C alone than COBOL, let alone "all other languages put together".
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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COBOL is most definitely the most ubiquitous programming language out there, and I'l take your £100 and raise you a further £100.
It's been in existence since 1959, compared to 1972 for C.
There are several articles that attest to its prevalence, here are just a few. There are plenty more if you care to look.
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5114/did-cobol-have-250-billion-lines-of-code-and-1-million-programmers-as-late-as-2[^]
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/apr/09/cobol-internet-programming[^]
http://blog.codinghorror.com/cobol-everywhere-and-nowhere/[^]
Quote: The statistics that surround COBOL attest to its huge influence upon the business world. There are over 220 billion lines of COBOL in existence, a figure which equates to around 80% of the world's actively used code. There are estimated to be over a million COBOL programmers in the world today. Most impressive perhaps, is that 200 times as many COBOL transactions take place each day than Google searches - a figure which puts the influence of Web 2.0 into stark perspective.
Every year, COBOL systems are responsible for transporting up to 72,000 shipping containers, caring for 60 million patients, processing 80% of point-of-sales transactions and connecting 500 million mobile phone users. COBOL manages our train timetables, air traffic control systems, holiday bookings and supermarket stock controls. And the list could go on.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare
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I'm still more than suspicious - the measure of "220 billion line of COBOL in existence" - is all of that still active? Of course there are a large number of extremely important systems running COBOL, I wouldn't dispute that. But you stated "More code has been written with COBOL than all other languages put together" and that's what I find hard to believe. Because that would include every single O/S, piece of embedded software, projects that people like me never got round to releasing, and millions of other projects. I simply do not believe it.
Of course, that would also be impossible to prove, I also doubt the "80% of the world's actively used code" - how the hell do you measure that?
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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I have read that quote about Quote: More code has been written with COBOL than all other languages put together
several times and from completely different sources. I'm sure Google will help with that.
It's fairly obvious that the quote relates to production code and not code lurking on a server in a basement that hasn't been released..
I'm not here to try to persuade you (or anyone else) about the ubiquity of COBOL. It is without any shadow of a doubt, the most widely used language in the world, no other even comes close. If you don't believe me or any of the articles, then feel free to prove me wrong.
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult." - C.A.R. Hoare
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Well, I've searched extensively, and the only credible source I can find for that statement is from Gartner Group, in 1997. Even then it is qualified to refer to Business code.
COMPUTER WORLD had one beginning "I would say that more than half"..., but that isn't exactly credible, and dated from 1985.
I'll admit COBOL code is often freakishly long-lived, but I think its no longer as ubiquitous as it once was. It doesn't even make it the top 50 of most programming language popularity indexes (TiOBE, Stack Overflow, etc.). Some of that may due to the methodology of the measures.
Large existing systems keep using COBOL, simply because its too much effort to port it - and its also most modern languages have somewhat different design goals.
Of course, there's also the contributing factor that it would frequently take 50 lines of COBOL to express what could be 10 lines in most languages.
Even excluding projects that never made it to production, I still believe that C/C++ have probably passed COBOL a while ago.
"If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough."
Alan Kay.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: “THAT IS NOT DEAD WHICH CAN ETERNAL LIE, AND WITH STRANGE AEONS EVEN DEATH MAY DIE."
FTFY
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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